I have purchased pay per views from the Ultimate Fighting Championship since 1994, where I was welcomed to the sport with Pat Smith turning the face of Scott Morris into a Manwich at UFC 2: No Way Out. It was like heroin after that – I was addicted. Since then, I estimate that I have shelled out well over $5000 on PPVs alone, much less another sizeable chunk of change on tickets to live events and the obligatory UFC merchandise (who can live without the life-sized GSP cardboard cut-out – NOT ME).

Throughout that time I have been an advocate of MMA to the uninformed masses that I’ve encountered at watering holes across this great land. For every, “That UFC shit is just a legalized bar fight” comment, I would swoop in like Dogwelder to defend the UFC and its competitors. It was almost a grass roots effort by the early UFC supporters to educate the ignorant and let them know that this is a real sport filled with unbelievably talented athletes. The edification continues today as many intelligent fans try to shun the perceived stigma that we are a bunch of tatted-up dudes wearing flat-billed TAPOUT hats and driving small-penis-compensating monster trucks while applying ring worm ointment to our wounds.

Then there was the figure-head, the fearless leader that was taking all the media scrutiny head-on and paving the way while holding up his middle finger to the man. After the ZUFFA purchase, Dana White was a perfect fit during the infancy of the UFC’s push towards legitimacy. Adopting rules and weight classes and marketing the shit out of the product culminated in a 7 year deal with FOX and its affiliates. Now the UFC is on the precipice of its fourth nationally televised FOX card and the ratings have plummeted from 5.7 million during UFC on FOX 1 (Cain Velasquez VS Junior Dos Santos) to 2.4 million during UFC on FOX 3 (Nate Diaz VS Jim Miller).

I don’t think it is a coincidence that viewership and PPV buys are down. I have always been a staunch supporter of the brand and even I, a die hard fan, am starting to see chinks in the UFC armor. The reasons have been dissected on CP with various posts but I believe that this is just the beginning of problems for the UFC unless some changes are made pronto. I am not saying that the UFC is in the toilet but as the organization has grown in stature from eviscerating the competition, a standard evolution needs to happen.

So with that in mind, here are five ways that the UFC can move from their current plateau all the way to the mountain top.

When two drunk jackasses swing haymakers at each other in front of a nightclub, it’s a street fight. When a redneck with a tattoo of a backbone down his back throws multiple spinning wheel-kicks, knees from the clinch, and what appears to a Superman punch (1:13 mark) during a personal dispute, it’s something different. It’s something we like to call…MMA in the Wild.

To summarize, beefy dude in the tank top has allegedly been sending inappropriate messages to shirtless guy’s girlfriend on the Facebook. Shirtless guy intercepts the messages, and then, posing as his own girlfriend, he continues the conversation just to gather more evidence, I guess, and not because he actually enjoys posing as a girl on Facebook. So, shirtless dude posses up with some of his bros (just in case things get out of hand) and confronts tank top dude on a porch, whose denials are not well-received. As it turns out, tank top dude has a hell of a chin, but it isn’t much of a “fight,” per se.

In the end, shirtless guy is unable to secure the stoppage he was looking for, but he has clearly made a statement to the rest of the redneck lightweight porch-fighting division. You can bet that “Say Goodnight!” guy was watching this scrap with great interest.

(“Stuffing the referee’s arm up his own asshole, is Jackson.” — Mike Goldberg)

We’ve seen the ref-cam gimmick during old PRIDE and Strikeforce events — sometimes it was awesome, sometimes it made us want to barf from motion sickness — but for the first time this Saturday, the UFC will be adding the third-man perspective to its UFC on FOX: Shogun vs. Vera broadcast. Here’s the rundown, from a FOX press release sent out yesterday:

As a pioneer in production innovation, FOX Sports has used unique camera views like Catcher Cam, Diamond Cam and Gopher Cam to bring viewers closer to the excitement of the sports they love. Saturday night at the Staples Center in in Los Angeles is no different as the network brings UFC fans to a place they’ve never been — inside the Octagon, within inches of the fighters battling in the cage.

Similar in size to the latest evolution of Diamond Cam, Ref Cam is a small, lightweight, wireless high definition, radio frequency transmission camera showing the point of view of the only other person inside the Octagon with the fighters. During Saturday’s broadcast, the lens will be placed at the top button of the referee’s shirt. The power-source, a long-life lithium ion battery and the transmitter are worn as a light chest vest under the referee’s shirt. Developed by Inertia Unlimited, it was first used earlier this summer during HBO’s broadcast of Amir Kahn vs. Danny Garcia fight and received very positive reviews from production and viewers.

When I was growing up, I was one fearless son of a bitch. This ignorance of one’s mortality that is present in most adolescent boys, combined with a rubbery yet somehow fragile bone structure, led to horrifying injury after horrifying injury. When I was ten, my older brother shattered my collarbone reenacting The People’s Elbow that he had just seen on TV, an injury that has limited my ability to enjoy any Dwayne Johnson vehicle to this day. Two years before that, while reenacting the ending of King Kong vs. Godzilla, my skull was split open by a rock that my younger brother threw just a little too low. Add in more than a half dozen soccer-related broken toes, a dislocated knee and shoulder, and torn hamstring/broken ankle combination that made me yelp like a little bitch with every single step I took in the weeks afterward, and you have a shortened but accurate profile of the kind of damage my body has been through in the short 23 years I have been on this earth.

I’ve seen some injuries is what I’m saying.

But clearly, the various afflictions I have suffered pale in comparison to the twenty or so fighters who were scheduled to compete this summer, only to be struck down by an injury curse the likes of which this sport has yet to see. One of the men who actually managed to compete this summer was former Strikeforce middleweight champion Cung Le, whose nose alone has seen rougher times than most multiple war veterans. After picking up his first UFC win over Patrick Cote at UFC 148, Le apparently injured his foot during some training-related exercise, and decided to videotape himself undergoing an ancient Chinese process (no, not Calgon) in order to help mend his wounded foot.

If a botched call is generally known as a “Mazzagati,” then this referee just earned the Pornstache Lifetime Achievement Award for this epic flub. Passed along to us by none other than KarmaAteMyCat, the above video depicts what may be the worst referee blunder in the history of MMA. Sound impossible? Prepare to have your puny minds blown.

The event was Warrior Nation XFA III. The day was April 20th. In a preliminary 135 lb contest, Justin Kristie made his amateur debut against fellow rookie David Baxter. You can watch most of the first round if you’d like, but we recommend that you skip to the 4:13 mark, where, with ten seconds remaining, Kristie locks in a tight triangle. Baxter either throws some open palm strikes, or in our opinion, appears to tap with five seconds remaining. The ref doesn’t react, a pattern that will become disturbingly apparent in the very near future, so Kristie promptly chokes Baxter the fuck out as the bell sounds.

Based purely on comparative success in other promotions, Alessio was/is basically the Canadian version of Jorge Santiago — a man capable of crushing 95% of the fighters he faces outside of the promotion, but one who simply couldn’t put it together under the bright lights — scoring impressive wins over fellow UFC veterans Chris Clements, War Machine, and Sean Pierson among others. Of his five losses, four came by way of unanimous decision, against superior strikers (Thiago Alves, Diego Sanchez), superior grapplers (Mark Bocek, Shane Roller) and superior superiors (Pat Militech). In an interview with MMAJunkie, Alessio discussed how his most recent loss to Roller was the hardest to swallow:

I’m super upset. I worked so long and so hard to get back, and the UFC always puts all this pressure on you about being exciting, so I tried to change my style up to be crowd-pleasing. But then I get an opponent in my last fight, where he just chose to hold me down to win the fight, and it’s just depressing that that gets rewarded when all they talk about is exciting fights.

I really thought that I’d be spending more than a couple of months of 2012 in the UFC. I thought I’d get one more shot. I don’t know where I should go or what my options are.

Though we are sure that Alessio will find success wherever he lands, his hope of getting a win in the UFC before he retires is a long shot at best at this point in his career. The 33 year-old Xtreme Couture products record currently stands at 34-16.

In case you haven’t been paying attention — or simply refuse to believe it — the next UFC light-heavyweight title contender will be selected from a crop of four guys who have previously been destroyed by current champion Jon Jones. AndImeandestroyed. Obviously, the lucky challenger could wind up taking on Dan Henderson instead, but we’re still talking about a quartet of fighters who have already proven that they’re somewhat less than belt-worthy.

Does the weak contender pool at light-heavyweight represent a low-water mark for UFC title challengers? Hardly. Even if the shot goes to Brandon Vera — a guy who has gone 1-2 with one no-contest in his last four fights — he’d be coming in with a win over a legend like Shogun, which is nothing to sneeze at. So let’s put all this criticism into perspective, and take a look at seven guys who really didn’t deserve a UFC title fight when one was handed to them…

In Tank’s defense, he was coming in on short-notice as an injury replacement for Dan Severn — but still, you’d think the UFC could hustle up a more legitimate challenger for their heavyweight belt. After all, we’re not talking about the Tank Abbott of 1995 who was knocking dudes out then mocking their seizures. We’re talking about the Tank Abbott of 1997 who had already been exposed as hopelessly one-dimensional, and had lost his last two fights against Vitor Belfort and Don Frye. Coincidentally, Belfort was on the UFC 15 card as well, in a heavyweight title eliminator against Randy Couture — and if either of those guys were drafted for the main event in Tank’s place, we might not have been subjected to the sad sight of Abbott stumbling around and wheezing after eight minutes of battle, too exhausted to defend leg kicks.